As 2020 was a year marked by rapid digital acceleration, 2021 was a year of exploring what the ‘new normal’ is for all of us. The world now spends more time online than ever before – it’s no longer enough to just publish content and expect audiences to come to us. Creating customer-centric, digital-first experiences is key – we are proud to help our clients transform their businesses and rise to these new expectations with the world’s only WordPress-powered digital experience platform.
Personalize, measure, optimise, repeat: all natively in Altis
In 2020, we launched our first Experience Block – the Personalized Content Block – introducing native personalization at the WordPress block level, giving marketers more control over their content and the ability to craft highly relevant digital experiences for their target audiences. Over the course of 2021, we unlocked full end-to-end personalization capabilities within the Altis platform: Users can now build, measure, refine and optimize their digital and content marketing all in one tool, rather than waste time navigating a complex web of WordPress plugins and other marketing technologies.
As our platform turned two years old in February 2021, we launched Experience Blocks Analytics, enabling users to better understand what personalized content is resonating with their audience segments and action those insights to improve the customer experience.
Later in the year, we expanded the capabilities of Experience Blocks to provide more comprehensive content performance metrics and a wide range of conversion goals. This enables teams to better understand precise user behaviour, improve their conversion rate and aggregate lift.
Improvements to our integrations framework now make it easy for marketers to plug and play with their existing tech stack, extend through the WordPress ecosystem and analyze data in a wide range of business intelligence tools for more advanced insights.
We also launched the Altis Insights Dashboard in version 9, making it easier than ever before to get a quick overview of your top-level digital marketing metrics – providing rich data and visual insights into how your site’s content is performing at a glance.
Go from ideation to ‘published’ faster than ever before
We continued to enhance the Altis editorial experience, workflow and collaborative tools in 2021, helping our clients spend less time on content creation and publish in a more agile way.
Edit, revise and save drafts of published content without affecting your live site
One of the challenges editorial teams face using standard WordPress is the inability to draft amendments of content that is already published. Altis v8 brought significant improvements to the editorial workflow by introducing a new amendment system. Users can now edit, revise and save drafts of an already published post or page without affecting the published content.
This feature was developed in collaboration with our technology partners Yoast.
Amendments work seamlessly with other Altis workflow functionalities users are already familiar with, including the publication checklist and editorial comments. While working on an amendment, the original content stays unchanged and you can still receive minor content updates, which helps authors correct errors in parallel with the next iteration.
Facilitate easy collaboration with Multi-Authorship
Cross-team collaboration can be challenging in WordPress, as the default CMS only allows a single author to draft and publish pages and posts. In Altis version 7, we introduced the ability to add multiple authors to posts, manage guest authors as full or partial users and attribute to multiple users.
This feature was sponsored through the Altis partnership with Siemens and is also available as a standalone open-source plugin – you can download and test it right now on your WordPress site.
Supercharged Developer Experience
We have made some significant enhancements to the Developer Experience in Altis, introducing tools and resources to streamline the creation of digital experiences and improve site performance.
Welcome to the new Altis Cloud Dashboard
The Altis Cloud Dashboard user experience was improved with a major design refresh in 2021, simplifying and clarifying the UI for users and developers. CLI access is now available to all developers, allowing you to easily perform maintenance, debugging operations and complex import tasks all in one interface. Dive into the details of these recent enhancements in our developer documentation.
Official support for Apple Silicon (M1) and ARM devices
With the launch of Altis v9, we now officially support ARM-based devices for local development. This increases the options available to developers on modern Apple devices by taking advantage of the power available with Apple Silicon, enhancing developers’ workflows with 3.5x speed improvements over the previous generation of Intel-based devices.
Comparison of PHP generation time for loading the front page of a new Altis site (lower is better).
We are currently running a pilot program across the Altis team using Apple Silicon for all development. Our CTO Joe Hoyle dove into the major advancements Apple has brought to the industry and how to leverage the incredible performance of this new hardware for digital experience development in this recent post on our blog.
38.7 billion page requests powered for our customers
Through major world events, global product launches and concerted DDoS attacks, we safeguarded our clients’ digital presence and ensured no disruption to their site visitors’ experiences.
In December we sustained the largest traffic spike we’ve ever dealt with – an Internet scale DDoS attack peaking at 795k req/s. Altis automatically scaled to handle it all, keeping 100% uptime and our cloud engineers responded quickly to additionally block traffic at the firewall level. Read more about how we embed security throughout Altis at both the software and infrastructure levels, protecting critical websites from potential vulnerabilities.
Say hello to 18 new partners
We couldn’t have achieved our success without our fantastic partners. Our nascent ecosystem grew across a wide range of capabilities as we welcomed market leaders in SEO, eCommerce, web traffic analysis, digital subscription, AI-powered translation, digital PR, design, digital strategy and more.
Our growing network of partners.
2021 marked the first anniversary of launching our partner program. We worked jointly with our ecosystem to enable clients across a wide range of industries from multinational publishers to heavy industry, tech and real estate to deliver better digital experiences for their audiences and drive operational efficiency.
We also celebrated the launch of multiple Altis replatform and new website projects delivered by the best WordPress & Altis development agencies around the world, such as Angry Creative, The Code Company, TaroSky and our own Human Made enterprise team.
What’s next?
We are continuously expanding the Altis platform to support our clients, empowering marketers and editors to deliver the digital experiences customers need today and tomorrow.
The recent launch of Altis v10 continues to expand personalization capabilities on our platform. We’ve introduced our second Experience Block – the A/B testing block. For the first time, users can run split testing at the WordPress block level to optimise their content by whole pages, images or single lines of copy.
The A/B Testing Block
Over the course of 2022, we will continually expand the Altis personalization suite with email Experience Blocks, integrated conversion funnels, more robust campaign functionality and more. Clients can check out more details related to our roadmap publicly available in the Altis Dashboard. Developers can expect to see further resources available over the coming months across CLI tooling, enhanced metrics and logging, along with dedicated GitHub codespaces.
We’re always looking to grow our partner ecosystem. If you’d like to enable your clients to create personalised digital experiences with the most powerful WordPress-based solution on the market today, or if you offer a digital technology that you would like to integrate with our platform, please fill out this form and our Partnerships team will be in touch.
2022 will be another pivotal year for marketing teams. The end of third-party data is imminent as users worldwide demand higher privacy standards, fundamentally changing how businesses drive digital marketing. Apple’s decision to switch off third-party cookies completely will be closely followed by Google blocking third-party cookies in 2023.
Altis Native Analytics supports marketing teams in their drive to aggregate first-party data in a unified manner and we will continue to help organizations stay ahead of these critical changes over the coming year. We also see the rise of zero-party data to personalize marketing and drive growth, further accelerating the shift to customer-centric strategies. Business models will have to be adapted and we look forward to working with our clients to ultimately drive better outcomes for their customers together.
To see Altis in action, book a demo with our team – we’d be delighted to show you.